Bill Watterson stopped drawing "Calvin and Hobbes" in late 1995. Everybody noticed.

Dan and Tom Heyerman stopped drawing "Pants are Overrated" late in 2011. I noticed.

The Heyermans' online comic strip was about two brothers who know much too much about each other (not surprising, since Dan and Tom are in fact, brothers), who get comfortable by throwing off their office clothes — especially pants — and spend time having wonderfully meaningless, insignificant adventures.

Enlarge Pants are Overrated

Pants are Overrated

Dan, for example, would fall in love not with a girl but with his Canon camera and try to kiss it on the lens when his brother isn't looking. That kind of thing.

I blew up my neighborhood today, courtesy of Alex Wellerstein, science historian.

Wellerstein works at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland. After hours, he is a mad bomber — but a careful, data-driven, history-minded mad bomber. His newest creation, which I found on his blog, is called NUKEMAP.

It allows you to choose a city, any city (I chose the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I live), an atomic or hydrogen bomb of any size (whatever kiloton level you like, or you can pick from a list of historically specific bombs).

On the screen, you'll find a Google map of your chosen neighborhood with your bomb, represented by a little bomb-shaped icon, ticking at its center. You can then take your cursor, move the bomb to the exact location you want (when you move it, it casts a dangerous looking x on the "ground" below). When you reach your designated ground zero (I chose my apartment building), you are ready for the next step.

You hit "detonate."

The explosion creates a series of concentric circles, color-coded to show the zone where everything is incinerated, the space where most things get emulsified or crushed, the space where radiation is lethal, the space where people are poisoned by radiation, the space where they are badly burned — concentric circles of destruction. The effects are chilling and fascinating. When I tried out some of the more powerful bombs, I was stunned by their destructive power. I had no idea.

Click here to visit the site.

Enlarge http://nuclearsecrecy.com

http://nuclearsecrecy.com

Alex is a serious scholar, his specialty being the history of nuclear weapons. He earned his graduate degree at Harvard, where he was, for a year, the Edward Teller Graduate Fellow in Science and Security Studies. (Those of you who know who Edward Teller was, may cringe.)

Playing with these bombs teaches you how big they've gotten. Drop the "Little Boy" that hit Hiroshima on any neighborhood, the destruction is grim but local, a couple of miles across. Take a 100-megaton bomb from the Russian arsenal, called the "Tsar," and it will ignite fires across a 48-mile stretch, an extraordinary reach, which makes me wonder, why? No military target is that large. I suspect the designers of these bombs were seeking wholesale destruction, that their urge here was beyond shock and awe, more like genocidal.

Wellerstein's site does not include terrorist "dirty" bombs. He has developed scenarios for those weapons, but in an interview with the Toronto Sun, he calls them "a different animal," since their range is so dependent on terrain and wind patterns. He also cautions that his radiation zones should be considered only rough approximations when you drop bombs in your home town.

Since NUKEMAP came online early in February, thousands of people have blown stuff up. So far there have been more than 20,000 "detonations," but Wellerstein points out that at the height of the Cold War, 20,000 bombs equaled roughly a third of the world's total nuclear arsenal. Since 1966, the peak, the pile has gotten much smaller. There were roughly 8,000 active nuclear warheads in the world in 2010, and maybe another 22,000 in storage.

And that's not counting whatever is going on in Iran.

Here's the riddle.

Wendy MacNaughton

The answer is at the bottom of this post. But first, a story.

It's from my friend Jack Hitt, who says that when he was 17 he was fascinated by ancestors. In particular, his own. He wondered if he was descended from a king, maybe a Founding Father. Anybody who's a Somebody would be good. He was looking for fabulousness.

His mother sent him to a cousin. The cousin was an amateur genealogist. And she started working her way backward up Jack's family tree and discovered — oh my God — that Jack is a direct descendant of Charlemagne, the great medieval king of France. And when she said straight, she meant it: Jack is 48 generations straight down, a direct descendant of the king!

Jack was thrilled. But then, he went to college. (Where so many things take on a different aspect.) As he tells the story in a new book, Bunch of Amateurs, to be released this spring, one day he is sitting in a calculus class that's about factoring large numbers, and the teacher says he wants to demonstrate something called "Pedigree Collapse."

The problem is we don't see the problem.

Because coral reefs sit below the water line, when they start to disintegrate (from pollution, overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification ... the list is long) most of us wouldn't notice. Or — and here's an irony — the more we notice, the more they disintegrate.

Some coral reefs are so overvisited, they are harmed by our attention.

What to do? Well, this is where the sculptors and weavers come in.

Enlarge Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

That's right, sculptors and weavers. Unappointed, spontaneously in their different ways, artists from all over the world are trying to remind us that reefs are in trouble and keep us from making things worse.

They can't solve the fundamental problem (oceans are extraordinarily complex ecosystems), but their ideas are creepily, astonishingly beautiful and clever.

For example, take a look at this man, sculpted from real life by Jason deCaires Taylor.

Enlarge Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

He is made of cement. Not ordinary cement, but a pH-neutral variety, designed to host sponges, tunicates and underwater life. Our oceans teem with microscopic organisms that constantly rain down from the surface. If they can land on a durable, solid, hospitable surface, they will attach, colonize and become sea coral.

Enlarge Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

Jason de Caires Taylor/jasondecairestaylor.com

Brock Davis plays with food, but not like the rest of us. He's a graphic designer based in Minneapolis, and this is what he did with Rice Krispies. He calls it Rice Krispyhenge.

Enlarge Courtesy of Brock Davis

Courtesy of Brock Davis

Ideas come to him. He will be staring at something. It will stare back at him — but from a weird place. I've been hanging out with gummy bears most of my life, and I've never imagined a gummy "bearskin rug."

Enlarge Courtesy of Brock Davis

Courtesy of Brock Davis

Here's something he calls a "Java Jacket." He made it from the recycled paper you'd find on an ordinary coffee cup. It works the same way, keeping your fingers from getting too hot, but this is so much more stylish. Says he: "Your coffee should look its best, no?"

I agree, and the sleeves are fully collapsible, so you can disarm the cup, if you want. He says, "I like it best with them."

Enlarge Courtesy of Brock Davis

Courtesy of Brock Davis

Some cups, of course, have to be watched.

He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that when he was a boy, his next-door neighbor was a famous man, a really famous man.

We asked, "Who was it?" And he said, "Have you ever heard of the mad monk, Rasputin?"

Wikimedia Commons

Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin (1871 - 1916).

I knew of Rasputin. He'd lived, I'd thought, in a Russian palace with the Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and had magically healed the czar's son from a supposedly incurable disease, then gained great sway over the Romanov family, and then, in a ghastly scene, was shot, clubbed and poisoned to death by a group of noblemen just before the start of the Russian Revolution. In my mind, all this happened in a different age. The pictures I'd seen showed him with a 19^th century beard, dressed in robes.

How could somebody talking to me in a diner on 7^th Avenue have also talked to somebody that ancient? It just didn't seem possible. Yet the old guy said, "Rasputin and my dad were friends. He used to come over for tea."

I thought about it. Rasputin was assassinated in 1916. A 70-year-old man in 1973 would have been 13 when Rasputin was alive. It was not inconceivable that this guy had actually met Rasputin.

YouTube

"Consider the perceptual challenges inherent in the robotic manipulation of unseen socks," says an engineering team at the University of California, Berkeley.

Suppose you're a robot. If you had a camera in your head, and you could watch a human doing a simple task, like bunching a pair of socks, could you, just by watching, learn to do it too?

Well, let's see...

Pieter Abbeel runs a lab at Berkeley that builds what he calls "Apprentice Robots." They are not built the usual way, with lines of code telling them exactly what to do. No, instead, they are given "perception mechanisms" to analyze what they've seen, then "planning and simulation" mechanisms, to copy tasks. And, through trial and error, it seems they can learn.

In this case, the robot in the video has to grasp the correct (open) end of each sock, even though they are pointed in different directions, and then put them on the post. Apparently Abbeel's robots can study a person or even a series of photographs and figure out how to do this, sometimes after only ten or so demonstrations.

iStockphoto.com

Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images

She'd wake up like we do, look out the window just like us, rummage through her days, but somehow what caught her attention — a grasshopper's hop, an infant's fingernails, plankton, a snowflake — when Wislawa Szymborska noticed something, she noticed it so well, her gaze reshaped the thing she saw, gave it a dignity, a vividness.

She was a poet and she died this week. She was, the obits say, a modest woman. When she won the Nobel Prize for literature, she was so discombobulated by the attention, she stopped writing poetry for awhile, until the world settled down and she could be ignored again. She needed the quiet to notice the astonishing, quiet things we might see every day, if we only had her eyes.

She had eyes for modest creatures. One time, she was wandering down a path — in my imagination it's a dirt path through a field somewhere in Poland where she lived. She looks down, and there, lying on its back, sits a beetle. It is dead. Nobody notices. Which is the point:

A dead beetle lies on the path through the field.
Three pairs of legs folded neatly on its belly.
Instead of death's confusion, tidiness and order.
The horror of this sight is moderate,
its scope is strictly local, from the wheat grass to the mint.
The grief is quarantined.
The sky is blue.

To preserve our peace of mind, animals die
more shallowly: they aren't deceased, they're dead.
They leave behind, we'd like to think, less feeling and less world,
departing, we suppose, from a stage less tragic.
Their meek souls never haunt us in the dark,
they know their place,
they show respect.

And so the dead beetle on the path
lies unmourned and shining in the sun.
One glance at it will do for meditation —
clearly nothing much has happened to it.
Important matters are reserved for us,
for our life and our death, a death
that always claims the right of way.

Wislawa Szymborska's passing is as precious as that beetle's. No more. No less. She taught us about weight in the world. We all have it. Every last one of us.

"Seen from Above" from Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 by Wisława Szymborska. English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

It's not like it hasn't been done before; it has. The problem is, it is so easy now, anyone can do it, and we'd never know because the tools are so subtle. I'm talking about doctored pictures — manipulating images, or what simpler folks call "lying." There used to be a saying on the Web: "Pictures, or it didn't happen." No more.

You can look at an ordinary image, video or filmstrip that seems just as real as the room you are in right now, but it ain't.

I recently bumped into a thesis video (hold on, it's waiting at the bottom of this page) created at the University of Illinois. It was prepared and narrated by a student-faculty team. What they did — and they did it so matter-of-factly, and so well, I was ... well, I was startled. Because when I was growing up, the folks who faked the photos got caught. Over and over.

For example, my history teacher in high school showed me Stalin's retouching of Lenin rallying the Soviet troops before they headed off to Poland. There's Lenin, up on the podium, apparently alone.

Enlarge Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons

The problem, my teacher said, is "Where's Leon?" As it happens, Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev were there that day, too. Both members of the Central Committee, they were possible successors, Stalin's rivals. You can see both of them in the original photo, standing below the podium, on the right. But Stalin didn't want them there. When he became leader of the USSR, they were airbrushed out. Stalin did that all the time. But very often, somebody had the tell-tale original.